2017

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt issue Hitler/Daesh like ultimatum against the kingdom of
Qatar and AlJazeera

'Close al-Jazeera': Saudi Arabia gives Qatar 13 demands to end blockade.
List includes cutting back ties with Iran and Turkey...

The closure of the Qatar-funded broadcaster al-Jazeera is among 13 wide-ranging demands tabled by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States as the price for lifting a two-week trade and diplomatic embargo of Qatar.

The list, obtained by Associated Press, constitutes the first time Saudi Arabia has been prepared to put in writing the often ill-defined demands it is making of Qatar.

Saudi Arabia and the other nations leading the blockade – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt – have in recent days been put under pressure by the US state department to set out specific demands in an effort to help establish a mediation process.

The US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has said the demands had to be reasonable and actionable. Donald Trump, the US president, has appeared more sympathetic towards the Saudis, in what has become the Gulf’s worst diplomatic dispute in decades.

The Saudi-led alliance regards al-Jazeera, the most widely watched broadcaster in the Arab world, as a propaganda tool for Islamists that also undermines support for their governments.

Other key demands include reducing ties with Iran and closing a Turkish military base.

2015

A Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent contemporary art scene has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam.
A Saudi court on Tuesday ordered the execution of Ashraf Fayadh, who has curated art shows in Jeddah and at the Venice Biennale. The poet, who said he did not have legal representation, was given 30 days to appeal against the ruling.
Fayadh, 35, a key member of the British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes by the general court in Abha, a city in the south-west of the ultraconservative kingdom, in May 2014.
But after his appeal was dismissed he was retried last month and a new panel of judges ruled that his repentance did not prevent his execution.
“I was really shocked but it was expected, though I didn’t do anything that deserves death,” Fayadh told the Guardian...

2013

Shame to the UN for failure to stop
Assad dictatorship massacring the Syrian people. Again and again the
United Nations shows it is useless -albeit at a great cost to tax payers
of all countries- as Sigmund Freud predicted to Albert Einstein [read here
their correspondence titled Why
War?]
Mass murderer Assad -with backing from his mates Putin and Iran's Islamic Supreme Führer- employs Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction against the defenseless children and civilians ... while Obama, France, the UK and the EU dishonor their pledges of intervention to protect the Syrian people.

Turkey protests: Riot police storm Taksim Square

Turkish riot police have moved into Istanbul's Taksim Square, which has been occupied by anti-government protesters for close to two weeks.
Officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets, leading many protesters to flee the square into adjoining Gezi Park. Some activists hurled fireworks, fire bombs and stones at police.
The unrest began after a crackdown on a protest over Gezi Park's redevelopment.
The Turkish prime minister said the move was hijacked to cause vandalism.
The original protests have widened, with demonstrators accusing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government of becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to impose conservative Islamic values on a secular state.
... more in BBC - AlJazeera - The Guardian - El Mundo - France 24

2012

A Qatari poet, who has been sentenced to life for comments said to be critical of the Qatari leadership, will take his case to an appeal court, his lawyer Najeeb al-Naimi has said.
Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, 36, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for what is said to be attempts to destabilise the country.
Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, criticised the Qatari government for the harsh sentencing.
"The international community must admit that there is international terrorism in Syria supported by states, states that claim to want to protect human rights in Syria, states which do not hesitate to condemn a poet to a life sentence merely because he had the temerity to write a poem condemning the emir of his country," Jaafari said on Friday.
Al-Ajami, who has been largely held in solitary confinement, spoke to the Reuters news agency in the presence of prison guards and others.
"The Emir is a good man," he told the agency. "I think he doesn't know that they have me here for a year, that they have put me in a single room.
"If he knew, I would be freed," he said.
"This is wrong," al-Ajami said. "You can't have Al Jazeera in this country and put me in jail for being a poet."
Al-Naimi said he would appeal next week against the verdict, which was handed down after six hearings. The poet was arrested in November 2011.
...more in AlJazeera - Doha News - BBC - The Guardian - Amnesty Internatinal - Voltaire.net

2011

Perhaps Israelis need humiliation to respect others

Israel should view the harassment of Israeli Turkish Airlines passengers humbly as it serves as an embarrassing reflection on us ... and same in Egypt ...etc
The Israeli response that has followed the harassment of Israeli Turkish Airlines passengers who experienced detention and intrusive body searches upon their arrival at Istanbul airport on Monday, borders on hysteria and hypocrisy. The incident was blown out of all proportion and immediately became an additional and unnecessary chapter in the friction between Turkey and Israel.
There is no doubt about the fact that the conduct of Istanbul airport authorities was improper, and it is unforgivable - even if it was the result of retaliation for similar treatment Israeli authorities accorded Turkish air travelers. Nonetheless, Israeli citizens, and even more so the Israeli government and the Israel Airports Authority, should view it more humbly inasmuch as it serves as an embarrassing reflection on us.

The security check that Turkish citizens - and passengers from other countries with a Muslim majority - experience as they travel through Israel is stringent, overbearing and humiliating. Israeli citizens have gotten used to taking off for Turkey without the need for a visa, enjoying the hospitality of Turkish tourism services and vacationing in their multitudes in Turkish cities, villages and beach resorts without any restriction. Turks seeking to come to Israel for a visit, however, have had to go through a real ordeal, beginning at the Israeli consulate, where on occasion they get turned down without explanation, and later - assuming they get a visa - ending with an exhausting and humiliating airport security check.
The State of Israel has never apologized to these visitors and has never thought they deserved compensation for the lost time and the insult. Israel doesn't bother at all to explain its offensive security inspection procedures. To this day, it has not provided a proper response to the High Court of Justice, which demanded an explanation over the blatant discrimination experienced by Israeli Arabs before they board flights here.
...more in Haaretz - Al Jazeera - The Guardian - France 24 - El Mundo - Publico - La Repubblica - Die Spiegel - MSNBC- BBC

Thousands join 'Day of Rage' across the Middle East

• In Iraq, six killed as frustration erupts over corruption
• Yemen holds its biggest pro-democracy rally
• Egyptians demand accelerated reforms
Protests erupted in cities across the Middle East and North Africa. At least six people were reported killed and dozens injured in Iraq; thousands took to the streets in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a; and Egyptians gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to demand an accelerated reform programme.
...more in The Guardian

Robert Fisk: These are secular popular revolts – yet everyone is blaming religion.

Our writer, who was in Cairo as the revolution took hold in Egypt, reports from Bahrain on why Islam has little to do with what is going on.
Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister hand – al-Qa'ida's hand, the Muslim Brotherhood's hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah's bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.
Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the "stable" dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West's hypocrisy that they didn't want America on their side. "The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers," an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. "Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side." At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. "We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks," a medical orderly told me on Friday. "And now Obama wants to be on our side?"

by Chris Arsenault
As Hungary's political changes began, Istavan Rev watched cautiously. Like thousands of his countrymen, he feared violence, counter-revolution or extremism - products of revolution the world over.
Two decades after the 1989 political transformation broke the chains of Soviet control, lessons learned in Budapest could now provide insights for jubilant crowds in Egypt and Tunisia.
Likewise, the guillotines of France in 1789, the Bolshevik purges of 1917 and the shrewd ability of Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Party to marginalise other social movements in 1979 provide chilling lessons to would-be revolutionaries.
"What happened in most of the countries of east and central Europe in former Soviet satellites were not typical revolutions, not revolutions in the textbook sense," says Rev, now professor of history at the Central European University in Budapest.
...It is still too early to classify the political developments in Egypt and Tunisia. They could be a reconfiguration of national life, based on mostly peaceful uprisings - leading to broader institutional change.
Or, with Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali out of the picture, the faces of the regimes might change, while the entrenched power of the "deep state" remains untouched, says Kristian Coates, a professor of global governance and scholar of revolution at the London School of Economics.
"Egypt has a fair way to go before it can be described as a revolution," says Coates.
"The removal of a figure-head is not the removal of a regime."
The classic 20th century revolutions - notably Russia, China, Vietnam, Iran and Cuba - involved prolonged, violent struggle, causing a break-up of the ruling elite, says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government at Harvard University and a leading expert on political change.
"Revolutions are usually much more violent than what we saw in Egypt," she says.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall closed the historical curtain on traditional visions of Marxist-Leninist state power seizures, the "colour" revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia provide a good example of what not to do after so-called people power ousts an unpopular leader.
"In post-2004 Ukraine, the oligarchs remained embedded in the political framework, even though there was supposedly a revolution," Coates says of the western-backed "Orange Revolution".
"I suspect Egypt will probably go the way of Ukraine," he says.
"The embedded interests sacrificed Mubarak. He was the visible head of the regime - but these deeply embedded networks will be very hard to dislodge."
...To mitigate classic concerns like poverty, corruption and a lack of freedom, dictators in Egypt and beyond usually rely on patronage networks, guaranteeing jobs and other perks to supporters.
Those networks dominated much of Egypt’s economic life, with government jobs - and even positions on local library boards or sports organisations - doled out to ruling party supporters.
...learn more in Al Jazeera

U.S. foreign policy not quite align with pro democracy movements

Democracy in the Arab world?
We ask if the despots of the region will be able to restore their authority through bribes and belated concessions.

The protests that overthrew half a century of autocratic rule in Tunisia are spreading. The governments of Egypt, Algeria and Yemen are feeling the wrath of decades of repression as people take to the streets and demand freedom - freedom of expression, freedom from forced choices.
The spread of democratic voices in the region is unprecedented, drawing comparisons with Eastern Europe in the 1980s, but is it a false dawn?
Will the despots and strongmen of the region be able to restore their authority through bribes and belated concessions, or is the genie out of the bottle? And who will be next?
Our guests today are: Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University; Clovis Maksoud, the director of the Center for the Global South; and Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
Our interviewees are: Mehran Kamrava, the interim dean of Georgetown University, Qatar; and Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Winds of change in the Arab world.
Inspired by protests in Egypt and Tunisia, rumblings of discontent are growing across the region.

Could the pro-democracy protests in Egypt generate an unstoppable momentum for political reform across the Arab world?
The impact of those demonstrations is being felt in other Arab countries where people are also speaking out against the lack of political rights and freedoms.
As the rumblings of discontent grow, leaders in countries such as Yemen, Jordan and Algeria have introduced new policies for political and economic change.
But opposition supporters are calling those measures inadequate and are demanding a complete overhaul.
On Monday, we will be discussing the issues with Saadaldeen Talib, the former head of Yemen's anti-corruption commission and now a critic of President Salah; Syrian human rights and anti-censorship activist Anas Qtiesh and writer and blogger Khalid Lum.

2011

Anti-regime demonstrators beaten by thugs

Thugs wielding batons turned on anti-government marchers in Amman yesterday as the country's political protests turned violent.
Protesters claimed they were attacked as they started to disperse after a march calling for an elected government and an end to official corruption.
Police said the clashes broke out when pro- and anti-regime groups converged. Dissenters have been calling for economic and political reform since mid-January, but they have stopped short of directly challenging King Abdullah II.
The king sacked his entire cabinet last month, in an effort to soften the protests, but many were dismayed by his appointment of Marouf Bakhit as the new premier, a man known as a steady hand in a crisis rather than as a reformer
...more in The IndependentRead also :The dawning of Arab democracy

October marks 20 years since the guns of the Lebanese civil war fell silent. Why is the fate of thousands who disappeared during the Lebanese civil war still unsolved?

Also read: Act for the disappeared"HELP ME FIND MY CHILD". This call is not that of a single mother but that of thousands of Lebanese mothers whose children have disappeared during the civil war.
There will be concerts, exhibitions, artistic installations and screenings of documentaries to support the families of the disappeared on September 3 and 4, 2010, at Gibran Khalil Gibran garden, in front of UN House/ESCWA, Downtown Beirut.

...The Khiam Center for Rehabilitation organized a rally outside the headquarters of the Red Cross in Hamra to mark the International Day of the Disappeared.
Some 17,000 people vanished during the bloody conflict, most - it is thought - abducted and killed by militias. But some believe a few hundred may still be alive in Syrian and Israeli jails.
Because of the reluctance to stir up memories of the war, little has been done by the government to investigate the whereabouts of the missing.
The people who went missing during Lebanon's civil war in the 1970s and 80s are in danger of being forgotten as their parents and siblings grow older. Its all about a reminder," explained the organizers of the rally, dedicated to "the Lebanese government, that has taken no initiative to deal with the issue of Lebanese missing.

2010

How long can Saudi Arabia remain a land of contradictions? For decades the country has been torn between its strong, traditional values and a push toward modernisation and change. How is today's Saudi Arabia balancing tradition with progress?
watch the interview by Riz Khan in Al Jazeera

A road to Hajj - China

2010

The Rageh Omaar Report : Turkey's new visionary :

While leaders of the Middle East are caught between solving new and old economic and political problems, and while the peoples of the region are losing hope due to a lack of direction or solutions, one country is quietly forging ahead with plans to become a regional superpower. Ahmet Davutoglu believes that Turkey has the makings of a regional superpower and that its deep historical and geographical connections with Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Central Asians and Caucasians are an advantage.
...more in Al Jazeera - The Guardian - The Independent - France 24 - El País